Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The lead-up to
philanthropist turned politician Imran Khan's election as Pakistan's new Prime
Minister generated copious alarming prognostications across international
media. These vilifying accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. Rest
assured, the sky is not falling in Pakistan. To the contrary, Khan's decisive
victory represents a monumental moment in the country's checkered history.

The dominant
international narrative, stitched together by self-professed foreign experts
such as Indian journalist Burkha Dutt and Sadanand Dhume of the American
Enterprise Institute, followed these lines: the Pakistani election represents a
battle between puppets of the Pakistani military establishment, exemplified by
the figure of Imran Khan, and champions of democracy such as the recently
convicted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The corruption scandals
engulfing Sharif, this narrative held, represent the product of a conniving
campaign engineered and executed by the military, in cahoots with the
judiciary, to punish Sharif for his efforts to mend relations with India.

Dhume, in a
recent Wall
Street Journal piece, went so far as to say that Khan is
"playing a fixed match," and that Sharif had been
"railroaded." No doubt, the monstrosities of the Pakistani
military, past and present, are indefensible. However, viewing Pakistani
politics solely through the lens of a pro/anti-military binary is egregiously reductive.
The
Panama documents, which exposed Sharif's and his family's off-shore
companies and millions of pounds worth of properties in the UK, were not the
military's making. The ensuing legal saga that led to the former premiere's
jail sentence lasted almost two years.

The populists’ efforts to “go to the people” failed utterly. Far from embracing their revolutionary ideology, the peasants turned their worshippers in to the police. In despair, many populists established the Russian terrorist movement. If Russian history demonstrates anything, it is that nothing causes more evil than the attempt to abolish it altogether. The scarlet flower blooms in the Gulag. To this day the idea persists that the Russian people, especially the simple rural ones, somehow carry the moral solution to all the world’s ills. Under what Dostoyevsky called their “alluvial barbarism” lies the purest spirituality. For Russians, faith in the people’s virtue is equalled only by another belief: in the moral glory of Russian literature. That belief is warranted.
Russian populism (narodnichestvo, from narod, the people) began in the 1870s. The narodniks dominated Russian thought for two decades, and their successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, became the country’s most influential political party until the Bolshevik coup. The importance of Russian populism lies less in its programs than in its ethos, a guilty idealism that can teach us a lot today - not only about populism itself but also about the clash of any idealism with recalcitrant reality.

Vsevolod Garshin (painted by Ilya Repin in 1884) wrote with deep compassion and without sentimentality

Russia’s greatest
writers, painters, and composers all reflected on, if they did not participate
in, what one historian called “the
agony of populist art.” “Agony” is the right word to describe a movement whose
greatest artists drank themselves to death, committed suicide, or went insane.
Russians’ natural extremism makes the problems inherent in all idealistic
movements especially visible.

Jolting from one
panacea for evil to another, Russian intellectuals at last arrived at worship
of “the people,” a term usually meaning the peasants, who constituted the
overwhelming majority of the population. Today, the word “populist” is often
used as a term of abuse disparaging boorish, mindless followers of a demagogue,
but “narodnik,” though originally pejorative, was soon adopted by the populists
themselves to indicate their reverence for the Russian people’s innate wisdom. To argue for a policy it was common not to demonstrate its effectiveness but to
show that it was supported by “the people,” as if the people could not be
wrong. In Anna Karenina,
everyone is shocked when Levin, Tolstoy’s hero, rejects this whole way of thinking.
“That word ‘people,’” he says, “is so vague.”

Ilya Repin’s painting ‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’ (1870-73) became an iconic depiction of the people’s suffering
Any ideal worth adopting had to explain the meaning of life. In one of his best stories, “On the Road,” Chekhov reflected on such idealism by telling the story of Grigory Likharev, who finds himself snowed in at an inn on Christmas Eve. There he encounters a noblewoman, Madame Ilovaiskaya, on her way to her father and brother, who without her wouldn’t take basic care of themselves. She listens with rapt attention to the charismatic Likharev’s account of his lifelong embrace of one set of beliefs after another.

Today, the word ‘populist’ is often used as a term of abuse disparaging boorish, mindless followers of a demagogue. But the early Russian populists described themselves that way to indicate their reverence for the people’s—that is, the peasants’—innate wisdom. Likharev always lives “on the road,” journeying from place to place to preach idea after idea. Some people, he explains, possess a talent for faith, a special faculty of the spirit that compels them to believe totally in one thing or another. “This faculty is present in Russians in its highest degree. Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations and, if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or skepticism. If a Russian does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.”.. read more:

The remains of the
oldest public library in Germany, a building
erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls,
have been discovered in the middle of Cologne. The walls were first
uncovered in 2017, during an excavation on the grounds of a Protestant church
in the centre of the city. Archaeologists knew they were of Roman origins, with
Cologne being one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded by the Romans in 50 AD
under the name Colonia. But the discovery of niches in the walls, measuring
approximately 80cm by 50cm, was, initially, mystifying.

“It took us some time
to match up the parallels – we could see the niches were too small to bear
statues inside. But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls,” said
Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne. “They are very particular
to libraries – you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus.”

It is not clear how
many scrolls the library would have held, but it would have been “quite huge –
maybe 20,000”, said Schmitz. The building would have been slightly smaller than
the famed library at Ephesus, which was built in 117 AD. He described the
discovery as “really incredible – a spectacular find”. “It dates from the middle of the second
century and is at a minimum the earliest library in Germany, and perhaps in the
north-west Roman provinces,” he said. “Perhaps there are a lot of Roman towns
that have libraries, but they haven’t been excavated. If we had just found the
foundations, we wouldn’t have known it was a library. It was because it had
walls, with the niches, that we could tell.”

The building would
have been used as a public library, Schmitz said. “It is in the middle of
Cologne, in the marketplace, or forum: the public space in the city centre. It
is built of very strong materials, and such buildings, because they are so
huge, were public,” he said. The walls will be
preserved, with the three niches to be viewable by the public in the cellar of
the Protestant church community centre, which is currently being built...

Monday, July 30, 2018

The planet’s largest
colony of king penguins has declined by nearly 90% in three decades,
researchers have warned. The last time
scientists set foot on France’s remote Île aux Cochons – roughly half way
between the tip of Africa and Antarctica – the island was blanketed by 2m of
the penguins, which stand about a metre tall.

But recent satellite
images and photos taken from helicopters show the population has collapsed,
with barely 200,000 remaining, according to a study published in Antarctic
Science. Why the colony
on Île aux Cochons has been so decimated remains a mystery. “It is completely
unexpected, and particularly significant since this colony represented nearly
one third of the king penguins in the world,” said lead author Henri
Weimerskirch, an ecologist at the Centre for Biological Studies in Chize,
France, who first set eyes on the colony in 1982.

Climate change may
play a role. In 1997, a particularly strong El Niño weather event warmed the
southern Indian Ocean, temporarily pushing the fish and squid on which king
penguins depend south, beyond their foraging range. “This resulted in
population decline and poor breeding success for all the king penguin colonies
in the region,” Weimerskirch said... read more:

The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those
who had lost the protection of a national government, transferred the whole
matter to the police. Hannah Arendt in 1948

Over the past three
years, 3.29 crore, (32.9 million) people in Assam have submitted a bewildering
array of documents to prove they are Indian citizens - a process that sounds
like a routine bureau-cratic practice, but in reality has disrupted the lives of
millions. On Monday, it emerged
that over 12 percent, or 40 lakh, of those who applied have been excluded.

Of
these, Hajela said 2.48 lakh were persons declared foreigners by 100 tribunals
across the state, or marked doubtful voters by the election commission, and
their descendants were automatically excluded from the NRC process. In the hour-long press
conference, officials said those excluded would not be subject to punitive
action, detention or deportation — yet.

Satyendra Garg, Joint
Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, quoted Minister Rajnath Singh's assertion
last week that the latest list was a "final draft", implying the
application process had ended, but those left out could still appeal their
exclusion. "Based on this
draft, there is no question of anybody being taken to detention or foreigner's
tribunals," said Garg.

"I repeatedly
repeat that anyone who is excluded will have adequate opportunity to file
claims and objections with the NRC," said Sailesh, the Registrar General
and Census Commissioner of India. "No Indian citizen should have any fear
or panic." Yet there is little
clarity on what will finally happen to those who lose the appeals process —
called 'claims and objections' — and are termed foreigners in a country they
have lived in for decades. The Union and Assam government are silent on the
fate of those who fail to reclaim their citizenship when the process is finally
complete…

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Why procedure should be seen as no less crucial than price Both CAG and Parliament should closely examine the processes of decision-making; should they fail in this regard, it would be open to public-spirited citizens to file a petition in the courts

The Rafale fighter
jet deal controversy is unlikely to die down in the run up to the general
elections. The Opposition has already questioned the price of the deal and the
secrecy clause, and made charges of crony capitalism. There is an oblique
suggestion of kickbacks involved. Normally such
allegations would be par for the course in any lively democracy. So would the
privilege motion moved in the Lok Sabha by the Congress party against the Prime
Minister and the Minister for Defence. However, the defence minister’s
over-the-top reaction during the no-confidence debate prompted several
observers to wonder whether “the lady doth protest too much”.

Despite the furore
over the past two weeks, several significant issues of procedure need to be
addressed in public and in Parliament. The first question to
ask for such a large deal would be: When did the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) clear it? It is
the CCS which deals with capital expenditure of more than Rs 10 billion in
defence-related purchases and projects. At 7.87 billion euros (over Rs 580
billion), this deal was valued several times over that limit. A Cabinet note
would have been moved for clearance by the CCS and the Cabinet.

NB: This comment on current developments in India was discussed at an extended meeting of concerned citizens early in July, 2018. It is part of a series of such non-partisan discussions taking place in various parts of the country. Readers are welcome to use it - and add to it - to debate issues that have disappeared from the mainstream media. DS

1/ The current situation in India
exhibits an incremental breakdown of justice. The causes for this are complex,
but it has serious consequences for ordinary citizens. At lower levels the poor
do not even have access to lawyers. Honest public prosecutors are harassed and
in some cases judges have been complicit in the harassment of the innocent. The
crisis in the Supreme Court over the allocation of cases, the public protest by
four senior judges; and the manner in which the suicide note of ex-CM Kalikho Pul and the mysterious death of Judge Loya have been dealt with are indications
of this breakdown. The shortage of judges has nothing to do with the crisis of
justice. A fair and functional justice system is crucial to the legitimacy of the
Indian Union, which can be maintained only by proper functioning of justice, not
vigilantism and state-sponsored violence. The erosion of justice will
permanently damage the basis of the state. Educating public opinion about this
is a crucial task for civil society activists.

2/ Communal politics will destroy justice and the
rule of law – especially when communal ideologies receive official or
semi-official encouragement. These politics are related to the events of 1947,
1984, 1992, 2002 – it is a controversial question which needs to be discussed
frankly. Currently, hatred, impunity and suspension of all restraint are fast converging
(with direct support by the NDA government and its extra-constitutional
authority, the RSS); to destroy the distinction between legal and illegal
violence. This is extremely dangerous for the fate of Indian democracy and our
fundamental rights including Article 21, the right to life. The influence of
communal ideologies on NGO’s and workers movements is also a matter of grave
concern.

3/ Democratic institutions are far more important
for the poor and victimised sections of the population including women, than to
the elite. Understanding the link between communal violence, criminal justice
and the decline of democratic institutions should be a prime concern for all
democrats. Necessary steps should be taken to ensure fearlessness among judges.
Jail reform also needs urgent attention. Police officials require basic
training in constitutional norms and obligations of public servants.

Electoral Reforms

1/ Elections alone cannot strengthen democracy.
However, elections are important means of expressing opinion. Indian elections
have achieved stunning results, like in 1977 when Mrs Gandhi was defeated. But elections
tend to be fought on emotional issues. Thus, in 1977, popular anger against the
family planning atrocities cannot be underestimated.

The Delhi High Court
has slammed Delhi Police for forcibly separating an inter-faith couple despite
knowing well that the Muslim woman is above 21 years and had married the Hindu
man of her own free will. A bench of Justice S
Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel has sought an explanation from Delhi Police
over allegations that they kept the husband in the police lock-up from July 3
to 5 without presenting him in any court. The court order came
while hearing a habeas corpus filed by the man who was seeking the wife's
whereabouts.

The couple got married
in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, on June 28, 2018 and then started residing at the
man's residence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in New Delhi. On July 3, at around 8
pm, policemen accompanied by JNU security personnel and others in civilian
clothes forcibly took away the woman and handed over the man to police, who was
taken to Loni police station and kept in the lock-up for three days.

The man alleged
that he was abused and beaten in custody and threatened he would be implicated
in a false case of rape if he tried to reunite with his wife. The police action
came after a complaint was lodged at Loni police station by the woman’s brother
that his sister was missing

The court has asked
the police to explain how it proceeded to act on the complaint received from
the woman's brother despite knowing that she was an adult and entitled to take
her own decisions. The bench met the
young woman in the judge’s chamber. She told the judges that she had married
the man of her own choice and the marriage was registered at Ghaziabad. To ensure that there
was no untoward or unpleasant incident hereafter, the court has directed the
police to provide security to the couple as well as their family and listed the
matter for further hearing on August 7.

The bench spoke to the
young woman's mother and explained to her that although she may have
reservations about her daughter's marriage to someone from a different
religion, the latter is entitled to make her choices as she was an adult. The girl's mother told
the court that it would be up to her daughter to decide what she wanted to do
with her life.

As the young woman
wished to return to her husband, the bench gave her the permission to reunite
with her husband, who was also present in the courtroom.

The party is addicted to the ideas of nation state, progress and development pickled in the formal-dehyde of the 19th century. Its patriotism is a deep devotion to repeating these ideas in the present. No other regime is as idolatrous of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to ‘Make in India’ is an invitation to the likes of them to make India’s future because India as a regime is clueless about it — we are being out-thought and out-fought in every forum.

Sociologists have
often commented that outsiders have a more clear-sighted view of everydayness
than us. Recently, I was ranting against the communalism of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) when a European friend of mine, a philosopher, observed that
the categories of left and right were grossly overdrawn in India. They emphasised
a world of deep dualisms, or even a richness of traditional thought, that does
not exist in India. India, he said, cannot claim a Gramsci or a Rosa Luxemburg.
Worse, our rightist parties have no sense of the creative traditions of
conservatism. An Indian Edmund Burke is unthinkable. Beyond its corrosive
communalism, the BJP has no idea of the right as a systematic ideology. The
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of capitalism is adequate. Mohandas Gandhi
and Rabindranath Tagore were more creative nationalists than Veer Savarkar or
K.B. Hedgewar. My friend noted that
Indian parties were more vehicles for modernity, and it is as exponents of
modernity that they make sense. One has to explore how these parties use time,
history, linearity as modernising forces. It is as vehicles of modernity that
parties come to power.

Surrogate
moderniser

When the Congress lost
its modernising impetus, the BJP became the surrogate moderniser. It is in
terms of its claims to modernity that the BJP has to be assessed. The BJP’s
attitude to time has always intrigued me. So far, it has been dealt with
eclectically. If the left saw economics as a classic force, history was always
the collective impetus for the BJP. Its obsession with history confuses myth
and the rationality of logos. At one level, it contemporarises the ancients by
creating equivalences to current achievements in ancient times. The examples
range from test-tube babies and plastic surgery to biotechnology. India is seen
as one fluid continuity from the Vedic Age to now. While ancient history is
rendered current, it rewrites the history of the last 500 years, unable to
accept defeat. It desperately wants Maharana Pratap to win the Battle of
Haldighati, and it insists Ram was a historical figure. It is perpetually encouraging
people to rectify history at every stage, where even murder becomes an act of
rectification, for instance of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri in 2015 or Afrazul Khan
in Rajsamand in 2017.

Often the BJP’s use of
time is more strategic and complex. It fetishes 2019, which it sees as the end
of Congress history and the beginning of Ram Rajya. Everything focusses on
2019, and BJP president Amit Shah is the time-keeper, the impresario of 2019 as
the beginning of a Congress Mukt Bharat. This is not just an electoral
strategy. The BJP genuinely believes that a millennial moment it has prophesied
is coming.

Attitude to time

Oddly, for all its
fetishisation of 2019, the BJP is one party that has no systemic idea of the
future. It might borrow a few glib ideas such as smart cities, yet it has no
sense of the future as a set of strategies. The fetishisation of 2019 has to be
understood in this context — 2019 is its end of history thesis. It has no sense
of the future except of the NRI who combines modern consumerism with ancient
history. The future is 2019 repeated. The attitude to time
is best caught in the complete absence of ecological thinking. It is content
with linear time and progress. It dissolves the Planning Commission not because
it was a Congress idea but because it was a futurist notion. The party is
addicted to the ideas of nation state, progress and development pickled in the
formaldehyde of the 19th century. Its patriotism is a deep devotion to
repeating these ideas in the present. No other regime is as idolatrous of Bill
Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to ‘Make in
India’ is an invitation to the likes of them to make India’s future because
India as a regime is clueless about it — we are being out-thought and
out-fought in every forum... read more:

Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Arctic can have
this effect on people: its function in the imagination of the world is as a
place to test or define, to look for some truth about existence by viewing it
from its limit. The challenge of its otherness might explain why Mary Shelley
chose to open Frankenstein in the Arctic wastes, and why the Soviets built the
showcase coalmining town of Pyramiden more grandly and formally than its function
required. Now the significance of the Arctic is above all about climate change,
its effects there being particularly visible, significant and dangerous.

What if we couldn’t
stand each other, on this vessel alone on icy seas? Agatha Christie would have
loved the scenario

The belief that the
Arctic has something to tell us motivates the Arctic Circle residency, a
programme whereby artists, scientists and writers can, for half the actual
cost, take part in expeditions aboard a tall sailing ship, around the coasts
and islands of Svalbard. Feeling the need for new perspectives on life, I
applied – and in early June joined 28 other participants, plus guides and crew,
on the three-masted barquentine Antigua. Two weeks without night or internet,
ignorant of World Cup results and the latest Trump eruptions, voyaging between
78 and 81 degrees north, going where the wind suggested, marvelling at glaciers
in shades of blue beyond the power of words or cameras to capture – cobalt?
cerulean? sapphire? “Are you going to find yourself,” teased a friend, “under
an iceberg?”

Friday, July 27, 2018

The relationship
between state and capital is an important capillary of power in a modern
democracy. This relationship is governed by many contradictory impulses. In a
democracy, politicians need capital for elections and for sustaining politics
as a career choice. But politics also has to be responsive to the demands of
social legitimation. There is a second issue. There is often a tension between
seeking policies that favour particular businesses and policies that favour a
level playing field based on principles that produce growth. The third tension
is between the imperatives of looking business friendly on the one hand, and
incorporating genuine public goods into regulation on the other — like
environment and human rights. These tensions are perennial in any democracy.

The UPA mismanaged
these tensions. Corruption had reached a point where the demands of social
legitimation had become nearly impossible; the state became an outright
plutocracy. This spawned not just an anti-corruption movement that
delegitimised Congress at the time. It led to a whole series of hit and miss
judicial interventions. The inability to meet the demands of legitimation
produced a policy paralysis of sorts. The second tension was manifest largely
in the way the government doled out credit. The exercise of discretionary power
in this area brought the banking system to its knees. It produced a protracted
crisis that continues: Private investment is still tepid. And third, on labour
and environment, the government doled out symbolic protections but, by and
large, capital had the upper hand... The BJP, therefore, had
the task of re-managing these tensions.

The jury is still out on whether India
is less plutocratic than before. But the BJP has sought to manage the tensions
by three devices. The first lesson they learnt from the Congress debacle was
this. During Congress rule, individual Congressmen were benefitting from using
state power, but the party was losing. This was double jeopardy for the
Congress. On the one hand, it meant lots of Congress leaders were exercising
their individual channels of influence without the benefit accruing to the
party. The result was that individual Congressmen were rich but the party was
poor. This still haunts the Congress. On the other hand, the system created a
free-for-all which magnified perceptions of corruption. The BJP has the
advantage that its state-capital dealings are more centralised, so the more
benefits accrue to the party and its centralised leadership, it also has the
advantage of reducing the appearance of transactional corruption since, if the
party has an efficient resource mobilisation strategy, it can often afford to
rein in on more transactional corruption by individual leaders. The second
device was to create new instruments like electoral bonds that are opaque to
the public but provide a new channel of financing. Third, it tried to occupy
the space of anti-plutocratic politics with decidedly mixed results.
Demonetisation was one element of this gambit. There has also been a slew of
measures that empower governments to go after economic offenders (attaching
properties, making bribe-giving as much an offence as receiving it). But the
results are yet to accrue… read more:

The extreme heatwaves
and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are “the face of climate change”,
one of the world’s leading climate scientists has declared, with the impacts of
global warming now “playing out in real time”. Climate change has
long been predicted to increase extreme weather incidents, and scientists are
now confident these predictions are coming true. Scientists say the global
warming has contributed to on the scorching temperatures that have baked the UK
and northern Europe for weeks.

The hot spell was
made more than twice as likely by climate change, a new analysis
found, demonstrating an “unambiguous” link. Extreme weather has
struck across Europe, from the Arctic
Circle to Greece,
and across the world, from North
America to Japan.
“This is the face of climate change,” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State
University, and one the world’s most eminent climate scientists. “We literally
would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change.”

“The impacts of
climate change are no longer subtle,” he told the Guardian. “We are seeing them
play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of
that.” “We are seeing our
predictions come true,” he said. “As a scientist that is reassuring, but as a
citizen of planet Earth, it is very distressing to see that as it means we have
not taken the necessary action.”.. read more:

Thursday, July 26, 2018

After Europe’s top
monopoly buster Margrethe
Vestager fined Google more than $5bn for abusing its dominance over
mobile phone technology, it’s tempting to relax about the power of big tech.
Not only is there a cop watching these giants, she’s carrying a really big
stick. But this week’s firing
by the New York Daily Newsof half the paper’s staff shines a different
light on the matter.

The reason given by the publisher – a sharp decline in
revenue – is largely the result of Google abusing its monopoly over online
advertising, in tandem with Facebook. Vestager’s
move against Android does nothing to protect the free press in Europe or
America. This means it’s time for other regulators and legislators in America
and in Europe to speed the process of bringing Google to heel.

To be sure, the
decision by Europe’s Directorate General for Competition (DG Comp) last
Wednesday is important. The fat fine was the clearest statement yet that
Google’s practices break the law. Further, the restrictions DG Comp imposed on
Google’s business model will crimp its behavior in key ways. Vestager and her
team deserve thanks. Given the political power of Google, their actions
took courage.

But it’s vital to put
the fine into perspective. In an industry that changes by the day, the case
took eight years to complete. Further, it deals with just one part of a problem
that is now very large and sprawling. And even after the fine Google will be
left holding more than $95bn in cash. Vestager’s fighters put out the fire on the
first floor, but only after the blaze had spread to the rest of the building.

Of all the social
goods now in flames the one we must protect first is trustworthy journalism. In
the nine years since Google bought mobile ad company AdMob, annual ad revenue
at Google and Facebook has soared, to more than $95bn and
almost $40bn,
respectively. During this period, ad
revenue at newspapers fell around $50bn in 2005 to under $20bn today.

This means fewer
reporters on the streets. The number of people working in America’s newsrooms
dropped from more than 400,000 in 2001 to fewer than 185,000 today. In New
York, the picture is especially bleak. The number of reporters at the Daily
News is nearly 90% below 1988 levels. The New York Timescut local
reporting staff by more than half over the last decade, from 90 to 40...

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Astronomers have found
compelling evidence that there is a huge reservoir of liquid water buried a
mile under the ice near the south pole on Mars. Radar measurements
taken from the European

Space Agency’s
Mars Express orbiter spotted the 12 mile-wide stretch of water at the base of a
thick slab of polar ice in a region known as Planum Australe.

It is the first time
that researchers have identified a stable body of liquid water on the red
planet. The finding raises the likelihood that any microbial life that arose on
Mars may continue to eke out a rather bleak existence deep beneath the surface. “We discovered water on Mars,” said Roberto
Orosei at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna. Any other
explanation for the bright reflections the scientists saw in their radar
observations was “untenable”, he added. Details of the finding are reported in
the journal, Science.

Today, the most
obvious signs that Mars was once a wet world are the ancient waterways that
sculpted the planet’s surface many millions of years ago. In 2015, Nasa
announced that it had spotted
water seeping down slopes and gullies on the planet, but that
interpretation was cast into doubt last year when US Geological Survey
researchers argued that the mysterious dark streaks were no more than tumbling
grains.. read more:

“The possibilities
that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful
1975 speech
on lying and what truth really means, “are a kind of alchemy. They
are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing
sight of these possibilities.”

Nowhere is this liar’s loss of
perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective
progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and
psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a
towering scale. Those forces are
what

Hannah Arendt (1906 -1975), one of
the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay
titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon
Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic (public library) - a collection of Arendt’s
timelessly insightful and increasingly timely essays on politics, violence,
civil disobedience, and the pillars of a sane and stable society... read more:

The Pentagon Papers,
like so much else in history, tell different stories, teach different lessons
to different readers. Some claim they have only now understood that Vietnam was
the “logical” outcome of the cold war or the anticommunist ideology, others
that this is a unique opportunity to learn about decision making processes in
government. But most readers have by now agreed that the basic issue raised by
the Papers is deception. At any rate, it is obvious that this issue was
uppermost in the minds of those who compiled the Pentagon Papers for The
New York Times, and it is at least probable that this was also an issue for
the team of writers who prepared the forty-seven volumes of the original study.

The famous credibility
gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up into an
abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as
self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material,
which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of
United States foreign and domestic policy. Because of the extravagant
lengths to which the commitment to non-truthfulness in politics went on the
highest level of government, and because of the concomitant extent to which
lying was permitted to proliferate throughout the ranks of all governmental
services, military and civilian - the phony body counts of the
“search-and-destroy” missions, the doctored after-damage reports of the air
force, the
“progress” reports to Washington from the field written by subordinates who
knew that their performance would be evaluated by their own reports - one
is easily tempted to forget the background of past history, itself not exactly
a story of immaculate virtue, against which this newest episode must be seen
and judged.

For secrecy - what
diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii,
the mysteries of government - and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the
outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with
us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted
among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable
tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be
surprised how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical
and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand, for the nature
of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought
and word whatever happens to be the actual fact. This active, aggressive
capability of ours is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to
falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever
else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus... read more:

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

NB: The RSS-led Government of India is openly allowing hooligans to indulge in violence with impunity. Lynchings have become an everyday affair. This may well be their method of preparing for the next elections - after all, communal tension is their staple diet. Maybe Pranab Mukherjee can ask them to stop, having certified their patriotism so recently. DS

Arya Samaj leader
Swami Agnivesh was attacked by a mob on July 17 in Pakur, Jharkhand, as he
stepped out of a press conference on tribal rights. Leveling blame at the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Yuva Morcha and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad (ABVP), the 78-year-old social activist said they had falsely accused
him of supporting cow slaughter and beaten him up. Agnivesh, a former
lawmaker and education minister in Haryana, told HuffPost India that
his assault in BJP-ruled Jharkhand was a "state sponsored attack".
The eight men who were arrested in connection with the violence were released
on the same day. The circumstances of their release are unclear. In a recent
conversation, Agnivesh, who has been a crusader against bonded labor and the
caste system for decades, talked about his ordeal on June 17 and why he
believes it to be a consequence of Hindutva politics and Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's "hate mongering campaign." Over the weekend,
another man, Akbar Khan, was killed by cow-vigilantes in Rajasthan. DS

Can you describe
the attack?

I couldn't believe my
eyes. A menacing crowd of 100 and 150 people just pounced on me. I folded my
hands, but they were so angry, they were shouting nasty abuses, hurling
mother-sister abuses at me. They hit me, punched me, kicked me, and threw me to
the ground. When I was on the ground, they climbed on top of me and kicked me.
They tore my clothes and threw my turban on the ground. I was shell shocked. It
all happened in a few minutes. I thought it was the end. I was prepared to die
that day. It was a typical lynch mob. Someone was saying 'gau-maas ke
samarthak, Bharat chodho' (supporter of cow flesh, leave India). I have
never supported beef. The dominant slogan was Jai Shri Ram, Jai Shri Ram.

What happened next?

For the next half
hour, they were just sitting there. Some people took me back inside the hotel.
The hotel people locked it from inside. I was hurt very badly. My backbone and
my ribs were deeply injured, and several injuries on my legs and backs. When I
recovered a little, I tried to contact Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, but
that was not possible, maybe he was busy. I left him a message, saying that it
is something very urgent, but he hasn't called me back till now.

Then, I contacted the
SP (Superintendent of Police) Pakur. I told him this has happened to me, a
murderous assault has taken place and I don't see any security around. He said
we did not know, no one told us about your arrival. I asked my organizer
friends and they said we have the receipts for each one of the letters we have
given. So then, he said, I will send the DYSP (Deputy Superintendent of
Police). I asked him to come and see what had taken place. I called up the
District Magistrate and even he did not come. Then, I complained to the Chief
Secretary Jharkhand and told him that I'm calling your district officials and
nobody is turning up. What am I supposed to do? Then, I think he called and
admonished them. Nearly half- an-hour to one hour later, only the police chief
(SP) came. And he sat down, smug, as if nothing happened. Then, they took me to
a hospital. The DC (District Collector/Magistrate) came to see me at the
hospital. I found the attack state sponsored and party sponsored without any
provocation…read more

Monday, July 23, 2018

Writers
against Self-censorship: “We have to fight against hounding writers into self-censorship with
every word we have…”

The thugs
policing our cultural fraternity have struck again. In response to
the violent threats against his family, Malayalam writer S Hareesh
has now withdrawn his novel Meesa (Moustache) being serialised by
Mathrubhumi, stating that he will publish it when “the climate is
congenial”. Meesa is the
first novel written by Hareesh, winner of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi
award for short fiction​. The first three chapters of this novel were
published in serial form by Mathrubhumi weekly, raising great
expectations among readers.

Then right​-wing groups began a campaign
of intimidation that has become only too familiar in recent years. Hareesh was
accused of “hurting religious sentiments” and “maligning Hindus”. He
was threatened that his hand would be chopped off ​to “teach him a
lesson”. He was abused and threatened on social media, forcing him to
deactivate his accounts. Members of his family were viciously
trolled. Copies of the weekly were burnt, prompting the editor to
tweet that literature is being mob lynched. ​

Hareesh has
been attacked for a reference one of the characters in the novel
makes to women's visits to the temple. It was a character speaking,
not the author; the serialisation of the novel had just begun and the
characters were getting established. Such disintegrated reading would
make all of literature, cinema and art vulnerable to similar
dastardly attacks. Moreover, disagreement with and disapproval of a
novel cannot take the form of harassment or threats.

The goons who
attack expressions of our multiple cultures want us to lose more than
one novel.

Several
writers in Kerala have already expressed their solidarity with
Hareesh. As writers and readers, as citizens of a democracy, we
cannot wait for “the climate” to change. It is we writers and artists
who create the cultural climate and not communal politicians.​ We
have to insist that we have the freedom of expression essential for a
diverse society to express itself; the critical imagination required
to examine the divisions in our society, past and present; and to
exercise the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution.

We cannot
have a repeat of the Perumal Murugan story where the writer was
hounded into declaring himself dead as a writer. We cannot have more
attacks like the recent one on poet Kureeppuzha Sreekumar in Kerala
or other writers in different parts of the country. The list is
growing. We appeal to all our colleagues in the cultural fraternity
to resist being hounded by the right​-​wing groups into
self-censorship. We call on the central government and state governments
to commit to a safe milieu for writers and artists to do their work.

No writer
should be hounded into putting down his or her pen. No democracy,
indeed no culture, can live if its writers are silent. This is why we
have to fight against this hounding of writers into self-censorship
with every word we have.